But, though sober reason told him this, it was astonishingly comforting to be going to some one who could be relied on to see the facts of the situation without any of that 'flimflam' with which imagination is accustomed to surround them.

"Rudolf Steiner was a complete nutcase," Mr. Smith writes, "a flimflam man with a tremendous imagination, a combination if you will, of an LSD-dropping Timothy Leary with the showmanship of a P.T. Barnum."

In other words, instead of glamorizing Sarah like The Times did with this biker edition Cover Girl photo and the movie lot "Easy Rider" title, what if the media published photos of Team Palin -- in this case, at Sunday's Rolling Thunder veteran POW/MIA motorcycle ride starting at the Pentagon -- as the flimflam they really are?

Here at least Eastwood had the good sense to depict what most psychics are like -- scammers and flimflam artists conning their marks out of a few bucks by talking twaddle with the dead through standard cold-reading techniques.